Rating: C+
Dir: Hans Herbots
Star: Geert Van Rampelberg, Ina Geerts, Johan van Assche, Laura Verlinden
Well, this is a bit of a downer. Pretty intentionally, it has to be said, and you have to admire the relentless consistency of tone here. “My whole life is a dark room. One big. Dark. Room.” So said Lydia in Beetlejuice, and if you can imagine a 130-minute, Belgian, cinematic rendition of that phrase… here we are. It begins with the discovery of a brutal home invasion, which lasted three days. The husband and wife are barely alive, and their son is missing. In charge of the case is detective Nick Cafmeyer (Van Rampelberg), and it has a deeply personal connection for him. When he was young, his brother was similarly abducted, a case which was never solved.
The resulting investigation reopens a slew of old wounds, not least because the unconvicted suspect in his sibling’s disappearance, Ivan Plettinckx (van Assche), still lives nearby and insists on communicating with Nick. Whether this is to help or hinder him, is a bit of a grey area. He also has to work with some pretty sketchy individuals, and other aspects of the case also take their toll. There’s one particularly harrowing scene where Nick is watching child porn, looking for clues (top). You can see in his eyes it is basically killing him inside, providing a horrific reminder of his brother’s possible fate. There’s also an autopsy of a child which makes for uncomfortable viewing, to put it mildly.
Belgium seems to have a… Fondness might be the wrong, yet not inappropriate word, for films about child molesters. I think it may date back to the Marc Dutroux case in the nineties. It horrified the country, and led to a widespread belief in a pedophile network, reaching to high levels [police incompetence only goes so far as an explanation for the subsequent lacklustre investigation, I’d say]. It also appears to have influenced the country’s film industry, leading to movies like this, or The Memory of a Killer. Though this is actually based on a book of the same name by a British author, Mo Hayder, with the location ported across the English Channel.
Is it some kind of cultural coping mechanism for Belgians? Initial suspicions along those lines became harder to sustain, as this drifted off towards a weird conclusion involving paranoia about female hormones, altitude, and a perpetrator who seems significantly less than the criminal mastermind I was expecting. This stands in contrast to the earlier stages, which are considerably more grounded – and not coincidentally, considerably more effective. Van Rampelberg delivers a complex performance, of a man who has suffered an unthinkable loss, for which he blames himself. Yet he had succeeded in largely putting it behind him, becoming a productive member of society, until the walls are brought tumbling down. Despite some clunky flashbacks, which didn’t add much, it works considerably better for me as a character study, rather than a grubby police procedural.